This book analyses how the European Union translates its principles of peace and justice into policy and puts them into practice, particularly in societies in or emerging from violent conflict.

The European Union treaty states that in its relations with the wider world, the EU is to promote peace, security, the protection of human rights, and the strict observance and the development of international law. The EU is active in peace processes around the world, yet its role in international peace mediation is largely ignored.

This Gender Country Profile DRC 2014 (Profil genre 2014 RDC) was commissioned by the Embassy of Sweden in Kinshasa, with the Department for International Development (UK), the European Union delegation in Kinshasa and the Embassy of Canada. It examines gender relations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and offers recommendations to the assignors, and donor community more generally, on ways to improve gender equality in the country.

Main challenges to gender equality include:

1. Who are ‘Congolese women’?

The dominant definition – explicit or not – is to see equate women with mothers, and/or in relation to male family members. Nationals and internationals rarely see ‘women’ as essential beings. This hinders understanding different women’s and girls’ range of needs and expectations, and therefore designing effective programmes and policies.

The view of women as poor, rural, ‘vulnerable’ (i.e. passive) dominates national and international agendas. There is apparently little interest in how women acquire, maintain, use and lose power. National and international actors lack critical awareness of the assumptions they make and perceptions they have of ‘women’, their needs and priorities. This report identifies the following trends in perceptions and assumptions:

a. Women are treated as objects for charity, not rights‐bearers

This feeds the tendency to prioritise the palliative over the preventive: marginally improving the plight of individual women but not changing the status quo. Programmes relieving women’s suffering often substitute the core functions of the state: robust political engagement could lead to systemic change, enabling women to access routinely the services they are entitled to. Programmes ‘addressing’ sexual violence try to relieve some of the consequences of men’s violence but do not prevent it. So some women receive charity, but women should be treated as citizens, whose rights the government, primarily, and ‘international community’ indirectly, are obliged to protect.

b. Women to blame for gender inequality

The gender discourse in DRC tends to place the blame for gender inequality implicitly on women, either as the (moral) educators of children, or because they show insufficient ‘solidarity’ with other women, or because they are ‘too ignorant’ to access their rights.

c. The unbearable burden of gender equality

Women have heavy workloads, household and community responsibilities, and little rest. Women in power are expected to be more competent than their male colleagues, resist corruption, and show solidarity with other women. The expectations on women are simply too high: they are, effectively, set up to fail.

d. Wanted: men’s agency

Men are central to gender (in)equality, yet men’s agency is absent from the gender discourse. Men’s agency and power in perpetuating and addressing discrimination and exclusion needs to be acknowledged and included in the discourse.

The Global Accord (2002) ended the Congo War, contributed to the creation of the Third Republic and influenced subsequent peace agreements. This article (in the International Journal of Human Rights, 2013, Vol. 17, No. 2, 289–306) analyses how justice for human rights violations was included in the Global Accord and later peace deals. It assesses how the power-sharing aspects of these agreements affected the pursuit of accountability, and finds they undermined transitional justice efforts and contributed to continued abuse. It concludes that free-wheeling power-sharing within the security institutions is the biggest challenge to both accountability and peace: post-conflict security arrangements are therefore the crucial nexus between peacebuilding and accountability for human rights violations.

The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security celebrates its 11th birthday this week. In the world of peace and conflict, 1325 finally put women, peace and security as a composite issue on the global policy map. It instructed the world of diplomats, politicians and generals that women are agents, not only victims, who require their place at negotiating tables as equal partners in the effort to prevent and resolve conflict, protect and promote human rights and end impunity for some of the worst crimes of war, in particular those of a sexual and gender based nature. But Antonia Potter and I ask: is it so far a triumph of form over substance?